


All That's Needed

by ObsidianJade



Series: Hallowed [7]
Category: Cars (Movies), Planes (Movies)
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexuality, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Maru being awesome, Other, Unconventional Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 17:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12752883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObsidianJade/pseuds/ObsidianJade
Summary: Maru was his anchor.  Nick was the one that helped him fly.Or: what was supposed to be a Maru-centric short for Asexual Awareness Week (October 22-28 2017... yeah, it's a little late.) and became a 2k study on the Blade-Nick-Maru dynamic in myHallowed'verse.





	All That's Needed

Maru tried never to forget how lucky he was. 

He’d been met with every possible reaction over the years; sympathy, confusion, even outright scorn. 

It had been almost a decade of bracing himself for people’s reactions whenever the topic of dating, sex, and marriage came up; for some reason, the thought that he simply ‘wasn’t interested’ seemed personally insulting to people. 

He got very good at dodging questions. 

Until Nick. 

Nick who, Ford bless him, had taken his grumbled admission with a cheerful shrug of his rotors and a declaration of ‘more for me, then!’. 

Nick who hadn’t asked if he was sick or traumatized or broken, Nick who had just... accepted it. Without sympathy or confusion or scorn. Like Maru was... normal. 

He’d gone back to his apartment that night and cried until he fell asleep, just from the sheer, astonishing relief of having someone accept him. When Nick asked worriedly after the state of his red, swollen eyes the next morning, he’d had to swallow back tears again - dodging questions was easiest when you dodged people altogether, and Maru had very few friends as a result. Being really cared about felt weird, but it was a nice weird. 

And then there was Blade, who, when the discussion came up, had twitched his rotors awkwardly and tried to change the subject, until Nick had rolled his eyes and said simply ‘I’m bi and Maru’s ace.’ 

Blade had asked for that to be explained - everyone did - but once Nick told him, there wasn’t misplaced sympathy, or condescending amusement, or even that dreaded scorn on his face. 

It was the first time Maru had ever seen someone have an epiphany. 

“That’s - that’s a thing?” Blade had asked, wide-eyed with something that looked painfully like hope, and Maru felt a sudden flash of... something... when he realized it. 

Blade was like him. 

If not the same, at least something near enough that Maru could finally say he wasn’t alone in the world. 

The proper terminology - _grey-asexual demiromantic_ \- came later, during the filming hiatus, surrounded by library books and high-grade bottles and laughter, Nick kissing Blade at intervals and bumping against Maru’s side, respectful of both their boundaries and their desires.

It was the happiest Maru could ever remember being, which was probably why what followed was the worst he could ever remember. 

Blade was stopped from diving off a roof but not from diving into a bottle, and Maru followed him because he honestly didn’t know what else to do. He loved Blade, had loved Nick, and didn’t doubt the feeling for a moment just because it didn’t come with associated screwing around that most people seemed to think was necessary. 

It worked for them. That was all they needed. 

They spent the next while falling apart together, until Blade abruptly made the decision to drag himself out of the bottle. Maru carved Nick’s name into Blade’s core, resolved to keep pretending he wasn’t going crazy, and both of them left L.A., never to look back again. 

They stayed together, because while being lonely together was hard sometimes, the thought of being lonely alone was unbearable.

They finally landed together in a place they were both wanted, both needed, and nobody questioned Maru cuddling into Blade’s side when either or both of them needed the contact. 

In the first few weeks, he wondered if people thought they were lovers, but the few speculative, side-eyed glances he’d caught from Cabbie were on the understanding side of sympathetic, and nobody else seemed to care at all. 

He stopped worrying, as much as he could stop worrying with the specter of his guilt haunting the corners of his vision, blowing raspberries at the Chief’s back and swearing at Blade when he did something monumentally stupid and crashed himself, and Maru repeated the swears hours later when Blade finally regained consciousness, sans his retardant tank, part of his landing gear, and his previous reputation for flawless flying. 

They survived. The old Chief retired and Blade took over, moving out of the larger hanger and into the private hanger on the hill. It meant the loss of their excuse for sleeping side-by-side as they had done in the early months, but Maru had pretty well moved into the quarters alongside the workshop by that point, anyway. 

When he saw the light still on at midnight the first night Blade was in that private hanger, though, he went up without thinking much about it, and Blade rolled the door open before he had a chance to knock. 

They slept side-by-side that night, as soundly as they ever did, despite Maru’s twitching and Blade’s muttering, and nobody commented when they came down for breakfast together the next morning. 

There weren’t many nights that they found it necessary, but the anniversary of Nick’s death was always one of them. The first few years, they would go to their separate quarters at sack time, leaving Maru to sneak up the hill after lights-out like an illicit lover, but each time Blade would roll the door open before he arrived. 

It was Windlifter who confronted them about it, in the end, over the breakfast table. It was too early for the Jumpers to be in, thank Ford, but Cabbie and Richter were both there, glaring at the coffee machine, when the Sikorsky brought it up. 

“You do not need to keep it a secret.”

Maru paused, his cup halfway to his mouth. Next to him, Blade had frozen, wary and tense, and was regarding the larger helicopter with a warning stare. 

“Keep what a secret, exactly?”

“That Maru spends the night with you sometimes.” That was Cabbie, who still had his tail to them both, but his flaps were twitching, almost flickering, with agitation, all tiny, nervous spasms. 

“Not like we give a damn if you’re screwing,” Richter added, retrieving his cup with a grab-stick and moving just enough for Cabbie to shove his own cup into place beneath the steady drip of coffee. 

“We’re not screwing,” Maru objected, almost instinctively, because that seemed somehow important, although he wasn’t sure why. Maybe defending Blade’s reputation, or maybe his own. “We just... sleep.”

Windlifter gave his rotors a slow half-turn, considering. “You are asexual.”

Maru and Blade both blinked at him in surprise. They’d never discussed it here - they’d never needed to. They knew what they were, what they had. It didn’t need to be anyone else’s business. 

“....yes?” Maru answered, finally, when it occurred to him that Winds seemed to be waiting for an answer. He hadn’t actually asked a question, but that damned patience of his seemed to politely demand answers sometimes, even when the questions weren’t there to start with. 

“You find comfort in one another’s presence. It is not something to be ashamed of, and you have no need to keep it secret if you do not wish to.”

“Windlifter, you have a gift for making everything fragging awkward,” Richter snapped, taking his cup and leaving without another word.

“That is not my intention,” Windlifter informed the room at large, but Blade’s rotors had relaxed, hanging looser than Maru had seen them in years, and the spasms of Cabbie’s wingflaps had ebbed. 

Maybe it wasn’t anyone’s business but their own, but having it out in the open helped anyway.

“Thanks, Wind,” Maru chuckled, toasting the Sikorsky with his coffee cup and earning a smile in response.

When Richter went down not long after that, Maru drove up the hill to Blade’s hanger at sack time every night for three weeks, and they slept pressed together, side-by-side. 

Maru thought Windlifter gave him an approving nod the first morning. It was weird, but nice weird. 

Dipper was weirder. She’d been a fan of CHoPs, and had sussed Nick and Blade’s relationship long before she arrived on the base. Maru got a side-eye from her the first morning he rolled out of Blade’s hanger in her presence. 

Windlifter must have pulled her aside, though, because she rolled up to him that afternoon while Blade was out scouting, and whispered ‘Blade is really lucky to have you!’ before rolling quickly away again, before Maru could decide whether to thank her or snark that Blade never ‘had’ him, that wasn’t what they were, and besides, Blade had been the one being ‘had’...

The thoughts spiraled. Maru spent that night cuddled up to a bottle, and Blade glared at him the next morning with enough force that Dipper took one look at the expression and bolted clear out of the Main Hanger. 

She kept her nose out of their relationship after that, though, which he and Blade were both grateful for. Their relationship didn’t need Dipper’s kind of noise; it had been built around mutual silence. 

Dusty was weirder still. There were flashes of time where he almost reminded Maru of Nick - mostly the moments of brazen, bullheaded stupidity - and Blade saw them too, there was no question about that. It made Blade sad and angry by turns, brought out the sharp side of his tongue and the sharp edge of his worry - none of them wanted another face on The Wall, and Dusty seemed determined to stupid himself onto it. 

Then Blade took a decent shot of his own at making The Wall. 

And then Dusty one-upped him. 

Maru was desperately tempted to strangle them both, and had the oddest impression that if Nick and Blade had been capable of having children together, they would have turned out alarmingly like Dusty in disposition. 

If the thought made him work a little harder at repairing the kid’s gearbox, well. Nobody needed to know. 

Then October happened, and things went from comfortably weird to several ZIP codes past insane. 

Maru avoided Blade’s hanger for a while; he loved them both, but there were things he had no desire to see or be a part of.

It took a while for Maru to come to grips with Nick’s return. Not only Nick being back, but Nick being back _with Blade_. It changed a dynamic that had cemented itself over thirty years, unspoken and barely noticed. 

Somewhere in the deepest and most selfish parts of himself, Maru was a little angry that his quiet nights at Blade’s side had ended. The better parts of him - a greater majority than he usually tried to admit to himself - were happy, overjoyed beyond words, that Blade had Nick back. Blade _needed_ Nick, in a deeper, fiercer way than he could ever need Maru. 

Maru was his anchor. Nick was the one that helped him fly. 

What Maru had forgotten was how good Nick was at lifting them all. 

It was Nick that came to him, only a few short weeks after his return, as Maru was still puttering in the workshop, the fluorescent lights humming the hours away above him. There was another bottle or two in his quarters that he’d curl up with tonight; they weren’t as good a sleeping companion as Blade, but they were available, at least.

Maru muttered a greeting to Nick without looking up, too distracted by his work, quickly followed by a yelp as Nick nosed up against his back and _shoved_. 

He squawked and argued and flailed his tines as Nick shoved him out of the workshop, although he never did apply his brakes, too curious as to where exactly this was going.

Where it was going proved to be up the hill to Blade’s hanger, shoved unceremoniously to the center of the floor at Blade’s side, as Nick bounced up to his other side, sandwiching him in place between them. 

He thought the better of arguing before he opened his mouth. He was here, between the two people he loved, the two that loved him back, understood him better than he understood himself. 

It had raised plenty of eyebrows back in the day, what the three of them had together. But here, now... 

He could roll out of the hanger in the morning smack between the two of them and get nothing worse than a couple of grins from the Smokejumpers. And if that realization was enough to make his eyes spring a leak, well... nobody had to know. 

Safely together once again, they slept.

**Author's Note:**

> This one's... really personal, guys, probably more so than anything else in this series. 
> 
> Until I found the word 'asexual' in a Sherlock fanfiction about... five years ago, now, I guess, I had no idea there was a word for what I was. I didn't realize it was something real and valid and to be honest, I just thought I was broken. Much like Maru, I avoid talking about my sexuality, because I'm met with confusion, incredulity, and occasionally insult. There's been a grand total of one person so far who's actually known what the term 'asexual' meant when I mentioned it and accepted it without pause. 
> 
> So... yeah. Writing as therapy, and thank you to Maru for somewhat inadvertently acquiring some of my issues to help me work through them! And also, thank you to you guys, who are understanding and supportive and just plain awesome. I couldn't do this without you!


End file.
